She’s also dumb as a sack of rocks.
‘Hi, Starbreeze.’
‘You’re different,’ Starbreeze chirped. Then she brightened. ‘Pretty cloak!’ She dived right into me, turning into a swirl of wind around my clothes, sending my cloak billowing out, then starting to tug it over my head. ‘No!’ I said, pulling it down.
‘Give me,’ Starbreeze called, her voice coming from somewhere around my back.
I took a firmer grip on the mist cloak. ‘No. You’ll lose it.’
Starbreeze reformed behind me, and I turned to face her. She was pouting. ‘Won’t.’
‘Yes, you will. You’ll forget all about it.’
‘Won’t.’
‘What happened to the last thing I gave you?’
Starbreeze looked vague. ‘I forgot.’ She brightened. ‘Air stone!’
I sighed inwardly. Starbreeze has seen my cloak a dozen times, and it goes clean out of her head every time I’m gone. I suppose I’m lucky she can remember ‘Alex’. Actually, I’m lucky she remembers ‘Starbreeze’. I reached into my pocket and took out one of the tiny pieces of silver jewellery: a brooch, shaped like a butterfly with wings spread. Starbreeze hopped forward, eyes wide. ‘Ooh!’
‘Do you like it?’
Starbreeze floated up into the air and spun around so that her head was pointing down at the roof. She hung upside down with her chin cupped in her hands a few inches from the brooch, stared at it with rapt eyes for a few seconds, then nodded eagerly.
I closed my hand over the brooch and lowered it. Starbreeze’s face clouded over. ‘Bring it back!’
‘I’ll give it to you,’ I promised. ‘But I need you to tell me something first.’
‘Okay!’
Starbreeze doesn’t rest, doesn’t sleep and can hear anything carried on moving air. It’d make her the perfect spy, except that most of what she hears goes in one ear and out the other. ‘I’m looking for a Precursor relic, a new one.’
‘What’s a relic?’ Starbreeze said curiously.
‘A powerful magical thing. It would have been found a week or two ago.’
‘What’s a week?’
‘The Council would have been looking into it. They’d have been guarding it, maybe setting up some kind of research team.’
‘What’s the Council?’
I sighed. ‘Anything interesting in this city? Anything with magic?’
‘Oh!’ Starbreeze brightened. ‘Men came to the place with the old thing. Tried to open it up.’ Starbreeze giggled. ‘Lightning man came. It was funny!’
I frowned. ‘Which men?’
Starbreeze shrugged. ‘Men.’
‘Where did they come to?’
‘Blue round place.’
‘Is there anywhere else in this city where men have been doing something magical with an old thing?’
‘No, no, no.’ Starbreeze swirled around my head, rolling over in the air. ‘Go there?’
I thought for a second. If Starbreeze took me to the ‘blue round place’, I’d be able to find out whether it was what I was looking for. The only risk was she might get halfway, forget where she was going and drop me somewhere random. Last time that happened I ended up in Puerto Rico. If you’re wondering why I bring so much stuff with me on these trips, now you know.
On the other hand, I was pressed for time and this was the best lead I had. I nodded. ‘Let’s do it.’
Instantly Starbreeze swept in around me. For a moment a whirlwind clouded my vision, then there was a tingling through my body and I could see again. Looking down, I saw my body fade away, becoming mist and air. Then we were in the sky, flying at incredible speed into the darkness.
There’s no feeling as amazing as being carried by an air elemental. Imagine flying in a hang-glider, soaring over the city by night. Now imagine that you’re going ten times as fast, so that the streets and lights and crowds below roll by like an unfolding blanket. Now add the feeling that there isn’t a breath of wind, and that you’re lying in mid-air watching the land zoom past below. When an air elemental carries you in its body, the rushing wind doesn’t touch you; it’s like swimming through the sky.
Tonight, though, I didn’t have much time to enjoy it. I had one brief glimpse of a huge curving roof, a pale green dome forming a bubble out of the centre, before Starbreeze turned me back from air and dropped me to the ground so fast that I was standing on flagstones almost before I knew what was happening. I was standing under the night sky in a massive dark courtyard in the shadow of a vast building. Opposite the building was a high fence with a pair of tall gates, and through the closed gates I could see lights and passing cars. The courtyard itself was almost pitch-black and for a moment I was disorientated, then I saw the massive columns to my left and suddenly I knew exactly where I was.
Starbreeze swirled upwards. ‘Starbreeze, wait,’ I whispered up to her. ‘Don’t you want the brooch?’
Starbreeze paused in mid-air and stared blankly down at me. ‘Brooch?’
I sighed inwardly. ‘Here.’ I held out the silver butterfly. ‘This is for you.’
‘Ooh!’ Starbreeze said raptly. A puff of wind whisked the butterfly out of my hand and Starbreeze leapt up and away out of the courtyard and into the night sky, spiralling higher and higher, tossing the brooch from breeze to breeze until she disappeared into the air and vanished.
I was left alone. I took a quick glance around me and got to work.
3
The spot Starbreeze had dropped me was just outside the British Museum. The courtyard was bordered to the north by the museum itself, to the east and west by outbuildings and to the south by stone walls, tall gates and a high iron fence with spikes. Beyond the fence, buses and cars tracked steadily from left to right to left along Great Russell Street, casting light and sound through the railings, but the courtyard itself was silent.
As I waited for my eyes to adjust, I looked through the futures and saw that if I moved forward I’d run into a line of massive columns, behind which was the museum’s main entrance. Starbreeze had said something about mages trying to open something. It might be Lyle’s relic, in which case this place would be under Council guard. Otherwise, it might be someone’s secret project. Either way, it was a safe bet nobody inside would be happy to see me.
If there’s one thing all diviners share, it’s curiosity. We really can’t help it; it’s just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, ‘Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then’, you’d get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in.
Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us.
In any case, even if this wasn’t what I was after, I couldn’t resist having a closer look. I flipped the hood of my mist cloak up over my head and walked into the shadows of the huge columns. In the wall beyond were double doors of metal and glass. Through the glass I could see an open area with two men at a security station, one sitting, one standing. The only way through into the museum proper was to cross in clear line of sight of both men. I stood watching for two full minutes, then opened the door and walked inside.
Everyone knows diviners can see the future. But what does seeing the future mean?
Most people think it’s like reading a book. You skip a few pages ahead, see what’s going to happen. That’s impossible, of course. You reach a fork in the road: do you go left or right? You might go one way; you might go the other. It’s your choice, no one else’s.
What a diviner sees is probability. In one future you go left; in another you go right; in a third, you stop and ask for directions. A hundred branches, each branching again and again to create thousands, for every one of the millions of people living on this earth. Billions and trillions of futures, branching in every way through four dimensions like a river delta the size of a galaxy.